Snake America 108: GQ, new shirts
As usual, today's newsletter is on GQ.com. Regular stuff, but I'm allowed to say it's me writing it. Before, my day job didn't let me. So this is nice. To celebrate, I am also making:
Shirts
There are two new shirts available NOW.
One is the classic Snake pocket tee shirt (Alstyle 1305 pocket). Two-sided, with the back print a link to the Google Doc containing stories I've written:
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/snake-america-pocket-tee-shirt-in-grey
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/snake-america-pocket-tee-shirt-in-grey
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/snake-america-pocket-tee-shirt-in-grey
Buy it.
Another is a Mount Rushmore shirt.
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/mount-rushmore-shirt
Buy it. It is on sale now on my bigcartel and will be for sale too at Joint Custody (DC) and Lower East Coast (Miami) soon. The question this second shirt attempts to answer is: Who is influential enough to Sam Reiss' newsletter that they would go on a Mount Rushmore, if he was granted the authority and manpower to affect a mountain face? It's a great question. This is the answer:
A lot of people I haven't met and won't ever meet are influential to me. For obvious reasons and reasons of taste I cannot get into them all. For the purposes of the first shirt, the four most influential people are: Alfred E. Neuman, an imaginary editorial mascot who I wrote about before, Michael Jordan, a former baseball player from North Carolina, Suzanne Ciani, an Italian Gemini who is objectively among the best ever to manipulate a synthesizer and whose giant impact and lack of respect (frankly) deserves a 60-foot permanent natural impression on nature, and Crazy Horse, who simply should've been on Mount Rushmore to begin with. (Here is an article that's kind of about that, an excerpt from a book in which much attention is paid to Crazy Horse.)(1).
Here is an incomplete list of individuals I proposed to my designer (Nat) for who should be on my Mount Rushmore:
I will also be making in the future:
Tote bags
Ceramic busts (of me)
Perrier coozys (these are in the beta stage)
Carroll Gardens Birding Association shirts (or maybe just membership cards?)
Tim Beck Osama Bin Laden-style target practice printouts (I doubt I will be making many of these due to the ... popularity constraints of Sam Reiss-designed Texas Longhorns ephemera)
Pocket protectors?
Ashtrays
Atomizers
Carroll Gardens Birding Association membership cards
Snake America Stockholder's Quarterly Report(s)
Narcan kits
and so on
Here's the GQ.com link:
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-atletico-madrid
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-atletico-madrid
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-atletico-madrid
https://www.gq.com/story/snake-america-atletico-madrid
and because these newsletters need to contain something extra for loyal subscribers, here are some movie reviews.
All the Presidents Men (1976, USA) (reviewed June 2018):
I used to watch this movie whenever I wanted to feel really bad about myself. For a good period of time, before my second surgery, the dissipation of journalism and newspapering as a respectable middle- and upper-middle class American career path was the focus of my intellectual attention. What had happened? Where did our dream go? As long as I’ve lived in New York I would go to The Strand and head, first stop, every time, right away, downstairs to the sports section to look for Dollar Sign on the Muscle by Kevin Kerrane, an out-of-print book of reporting where Kerrane, an U of Delaware (English) professor embeds with the Phillies scouting department. Kevin Goldstein, now head of the Astros' scouting department, said it is his favorite baseball book. (Former Yankees beat writer Buster Olney's favorite is Lords of the Realm by Helyar.) Ten years in I still haven’t seen it. Across from baseball there’s the media section, and I’d go there right after. I bought The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese once after coming up fruitless. It is about The New York Times in the 1950s and 1960s. Talese said the best-writing reporter on the paper was this guy named McCandlish Phillips, who retired young to become an evangelical Christian. Phillips' most reverberative piece of reporting revealed that David Burros, the leader of the US Nazi party, was born Jewish. Burros committed suicide when the story came out. Talese wrote other books but they weren’t as good, though his articles were about as good.
The story goes that in the 1970s after Woodward and Bernstein took down the President, journalism became an attractive profession, and more Harvard kids went into it. If you look at the 1976 Harvard class, one guy ended up running Columbia J School, one woman went on to run The Times and Peter Kaplan (RIP) was in the mix too. But they were in college when Watergate broke. I think the story is that profits rose in the '70s. There were more jobs. There’s an interview with Evan Thomas, the Newsweek guy, where he says he spent the first half of his career chasing the first year associate (I think) salary at Debevoise (I think). He reached it in his 40s. He has a law degree from UVa and went to Harvard, just like RFK and Ted Kennedy.
Bernstein was the better writer and Woodward the better reporter. Woodward went to Yale and the guys at the paper didn’t like him at first but he worked really hard. He did five years in the Navy and got into Harvard Law. He didn’t go to law school and kept on newspapering. I can’t see anyone with a brain ever making that decision again unless something changes. If someone makes that decision I'm going to law school. Woodward’s apartment in the film is filled with old newspapers and when he gets home from work he sits down and just falls asleep because he’s so tired. So I can relate to him. Only their boss’ boss wears nice clothes. Woodward and Bernstein knock on doors and write down conversations on toilet paper when they go to the bathroom and charm answers out of people and go without social lives and drink night coffee. The last scene distills two years of their work to headline after headline. Everyone reads the paper. You read interviews with Woodward now and he says he worked all the time then; he kept working with his head down the rest of his career. Did it pay off? He boofed it as city editor, and Joan Didion, who is as good/better at the other kind of reporting as Woodward was at talking to people, calls him a stenographer (best detailed in The Deferential Spirit and her review of his Cheney book). A career is a long time I guess. People get older and change, and I heard his Belushi and CIA books are pretty good. Bernstein went on to write about politics for Rolling Stone and you can see him on CNN still.
McDonald's be like...
It was hard then to get ahead in journalism as a woman or person of color or, to a much much lesser extent, someone without a sterling academic record. And it is hard now. Newspapers had 50%ish margins in the 1970s and '80s and made so much money they added new sections like style and real estate. Except for a couple places that neighborhood of money is gone and not coming back. If journalism was the back door to middle class life, it was only open to some people, and it’s all but closed now. I guess if you want to buy a house now and don't have a brain you can just be a project manager. The reward for Woodward after taking down a president was a really good day job. In Spotlight one of the editors drives a Camry. Congratulations for taking down the president, would you like to be city editor? Name five city editors. I like in the film when all the pieces come together, when they connect the dots, and when they’re driving. There’s a scene where Woodward and Bernstein are in the McDonald’s thinking they don’t have a story right before they get the story. The whole table is full of wrappers. I watched this movie a few months ago and felt very little.
Shame (USA 2011) (reviewed Dec. 2018):
Rewatched this for the first time since seeing it in theaters, here are what I think are the best scenes in the film, seven years after my initial viewing:
1. When he throws out his pornography and chili. The main character, who is a prevert, keeps pornography everywhere in his apartment--magazines, videotapes--and, in a fit of disgust and passion, he empties it all into a big black garbage bag, filling it to the top. When he is doing that, he also cleans out his fridge.
2. When he is watching 1930s black-and-white cartoons at home and his sister bugs him. He snaps at her and she later attempts suicide. This is towards the end of the film. There is a scene in Widows (USA 2018), the director Steve McQueen's most recent film, where a character--forget who--is relaxing, watching 1930s black-and-white cartoons at home, too. That character is also trying not to be bothered. He also gets interrupted. I think he is the guy's chauffeur. I like that the strongest leitmotif in McQueen's films is 1930s black-and-white cartoons. The Coen brothers pretty often have a man behind a desk. He represents power and is in almost every movie, saying no and not caring about what the hero is going through. Who that watches movies has not dealt with that? In McQueen films there is someone watching 1930s black-and-white cartoons who is destined to be bothered. Kind of like Chekhov and guns? So great. Anyways, in the scene, Fassbender's character is wearing a grey crewneck sweatshirt and the television does not come in focus. So we can't watch the cartoons either. Which gets us to identify with Fassbender. It is implied it's a Sunday. During the outburst he defines his success to his sister by explaining that he has a job and an apartment.
Manhattan be like...
3. Any scene involving the fact that he lives off what I think is the 28th street R train stop. This is one of the film's better choices. Questions arise. Why does he live there? How long has he? Is he going to live there forever? Why that building? Where is his office? I love it. I bet someone smarter than me can argue convincingly the root of his perversion traces to his Irish heritage, his New Jersey upbringing and his choice to buy (?) an apartment on 28th street near the Ace. Why does he ride the train home after an orgy? I guess that is solved in the movie's final scene. He also gets dinner with the girl he likes at a place off Delancey. This makes sense, since the film is from 2011, and many middling and buzzed-about restaurants back then were off that train stop.
4. There is a scene--the second-last scene in the movie--where Michael Fassbender's character goes for a run and at the end of the run he cries in the rain. As his tears fall we see he's wearing black New Balance 993s. They don't have a white midsole. They are all black and are really rare. I have a similar pair in suede whose gum bottoms glow in the dark, but only when I get home at night. When I'm at the movies they don't light up. Another triumph from McQueen!
5. He sleeps in the nude--that is crazy.
6. After he screws it up with the girl he likes, he hangs out at the hotel for the rest of the day. He doesn't play on his phone or read a book. They fooled around in the morning or early afternoon, and when it cuts to dusk he is still there.
2011 in New York was really a few lifetimes ago. I think this is McQueen's best film. Though I do like that his movies have become less stylized and more mainstream as he progresses in his career. His last movie, Widows, is as straight as they come, but his tics are still there. David Letterman and I.M. Pei had the same trajectory. Maybe Michael Mann? It is a great one. Even though the hero is a sickie(2), Shame is one of the best movies about New York. It is up there with Age of Innocence and some Abel Ferrara movies. I also love the scene in The Pope of Greenwich Village (USA 1984) where Eric Roberts is making the sandwich. Like I said, Shame could be the best New York movie this decade. Maybe? Recommended.
Thanks for reading. Tell a friend, buy my shirts:
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/
Snake
(1) There's a Japanese Neil Young cover band called Sleazy Horse and their cover of "Cortez The Killer" is as good or better than the original. The other covers they do are not as good.
(2) I also like James Salter's writing when it isn't smutty.